


thrown for a loop

by Acaeria



Category: Batman (Comics), Red Robin (Comics)
Genre: Gen, Synesthesia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-23
Updated: 2020-09-23
Packaged: 2021-03-07 18:26:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,255
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26622112
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Acaeria/pseuds/Acaeria
Summary: Tim explains, trying to hide his annoyance, because surely Bruce knows.Bruce has a look on his face like he’s onto something, and asks Tim where more dates are, then moves on to months and days and numbers, and Tim’s annoyance has turned into confusion.“Why are you asking me this?” he asks. “Don’t you know where they are?”And Bruce says, “Tim, have you ever heard of synesthesia?”
Comments: 21
Kudos: 139





	thrown for a loop

**Author's Note:**

> sephie from the fandom support group discord asked for some synesthetic!tim fic recs, and i didn't have any, but i suddenly had an itching to write some.
> 
> seeing synesthesia portrayed in fic is always weird for me as a synesthete? it's always something that massively sticks out, when really, when you have synesthesia, it's the most natural thing in the world. this fic isn't the naturalistic take on synesthesia i want to see (i'd have to work that into a longer, more narrative fic-- this is really just word vomit concepts) but it is drawing a lot from my own experiences which hopefully makes it feel less... strange?
> 
> another thing i wanted to do here that isn't done in a lot of fics depicting synesthesia was showcasing a less well-known type of synesthesia! spatial sequence synesthesia is one of the most common types of syn, but it's not quite as flashy or attention grabbing as some other types, so it doesn't get talked about as much. i have several types of syn, but sss is the one type that i genuinely cannot imagine living without, it's just so integral to the way i view the world.
> 
> & while there is a lot of projection going on here, tim's maps are very different to my own, and writing about them was painful. if tim came up to me and told me where his numbers and dates were, i would go feral. (he would go feral back at me, this is synesthete culture.)
> 
> aaand i think that's it for this very long note! this is very disjointed and somewhat atonal; i had no plan going into this and just kind of splurged it out over a couple of hours. this fic is concepts, not narrative. a quick warning for mentions of death (the graysons) in the first section.

There’s a twist at seventeen.

It stands out, because it’s not like any other turn in the number line– it’s not like the sharp turn at zero as numbers move from negative to positive, or the rounded bend at odd-tens (thirty, fifty, seventy) like a large, lazy river– it’s a full on loop-de-loop, and seventeen is caught inside of it. Like a car falling from a rollercoaster, or a prisoner hanging on the bars of their cell.

Tim had always wondered what seventeen did to be imprisoned like that. As a kid, he had come to the conclusion that it must have murdered another number– that there must have once been a value between seventeen and sixteen, or seventeen and eighteen, and seventeen had killed it sometime. In revenge, the rest of the numbers had twisted the line, and used the space where the dead number had been to construct seventeen’s cage.

A morbid line of thinking, perhaps, for a kid, but Tim had always been too old for his age. (In one of his earliest memories, he watches two people die, falling from the sky and crumpling on the ground like a can crushed beneath the wheel of a car. Maybe it’s a morbid line of thinking, but maybe Tim had never had a choice to be anything other than morbid.)

* * *

Tim is smart. He knows he’s smart. People are constantly telling him so. He has the grades to prove it, too. They call him “gifted and talented,” and he’s always put in the highest ability group at school.

Math is always a struggle.

It shouldn’t be– he has an analytic mind, he finds solid things like science and mathematical theory so much more satisfying than the wishy-washy humanities– but when it comes to doing actual, practical math, he struggles.

It’s just– numbers aren’t abstract, for him. They aren’t things you can just pluck out of place and put into formulas and equations with no consequences. They each have their own fixed places, and he cannot conceive of them being anywhere other than where they are. 

So when they ask him to multiply, or divide, he just– can’t. No matter how hard he tries, he can’t wrap his head around it. In the end, he always gives up, calls his number line to mind and counts along it as quick as he can until he finds the right answer (it’s never quick enough. His teachers purse their lips in disappointment, and he strings with shame.). 

(It never occurs to him that there’s anything unusual about the way he thinks. Never occurs to him that nobody else in the room is experiencing numbers the way he does, that nobody else is facing the same challenge of being unable to move numbers in abstract space the way he does. He doesn’t think much of it at all– it’s just  _ normal _ . How else would numbers work?)

* * *

It’s not just numbers, either. Time has its own winding path, its own way of lying situated in the space in his mind, in the space around him. His map of years is a mirror image of his map of numbers, the curves of the river bending in the opposite directions. The years prior to his year of birth fall away like a waterfall, crashing down and hitting a new ground at around 1800 or so, and then flowing backwards in another winding river, taking those rounded turns at odd-centuries: 1700, 1500, 1300…

Months and days are planetary rings around his body: days circle his head, angled so that today loops under his chin and the gap between days three and four is behind him, while months loop around his body with a wider radius. He needs to stretch his arms to touch them, fingers just brushing the fuzzy edges of awareness that time sits in. He can’t  _ see _ it, exactly, but it’s  _ there _ . A feeling, an awareness, like knowing someone’s walking behind you even if you haven't seen them yet.

He makes plans for Sunday on a Wednesday and feels a heavy presence on the back-left side of his head, a phantom weight of future busyness. He tries to remember a test he took in March in September and twists left to towards it, brow furrowing as the memories become more clear with the motion. He keeps track of where people are around him by which year they’re standing in.

“Perp at 2004!” he yells to Batman, once, and Bruce doesn’t manage to duck the punch headed his way out of misunderstanding. After they’ve returned to the Cave for the night, Bruce nursing the bruise on his jaw from the blow, he asks Tim what he’d meant.

“He was standing at 2004,” Tim explains. 

“2004?” Bruce asks.

“Like the year,” Tim explains, trying to hide his annoyance, because surely Bruce  _ knows _ . 

Bruce has a look on his face like he’s onto something, and asks Tim where more dates are, then moves on to months and days and numbers, and Tim’s annoyance has turned into confusion.

“Why are you asking me this?” he asks. “Don’t you know where they are?”

And Bruce says, “Tim, have you ever heard of synesthesia?”

* * *

Tim  _ had _ heard of synesthesia. He’d learned about it while researching a project for science class. But it had been the types that got talked about a lot in the media– grapheme-colour, chromesthesia. 

Bruce calls it  _ spatial sequence synesthesia _ , or  _ number form _ , or  _ time-space synesthesia _ , and Tim’s brain breaks a little as he realises for the first time that this isn’t  _ normal _ . 

“Then how do you comprehend it?” he asks, a little desperate. “How do you see… time? Numbers?”

Bruce, to his credit, takes it in good faith, thinking it over. “Numbers are… abstract,” he says at length. “If I’m thinking of the number three, I’m thinking of the… concept of it.”

“Just by itself?” Tim asks. “It’s just…  _ three _ and it’s not anywhere?”

“That’s right,” Bruce agrees.

That  _ can’t _ be right. Tim tries to imagine it and bluescreens. Error 404, Tim.exe has crashed.

_ “What?” _ he croaks. Bruce has a pinched look on his face like he really isn’t sure how to deal with this situation. 

“Are you… okay?” he asks. Tim nods mutely. Takes a breath. Tries to push his sudden crisis of perception to the back of his mind.

“Fine,” he manages to get out. “Just fine.”

* * *

(There is a twist at seventeen. 

Tim’s seventeenth birthday arrives and he feels his stomach drop as he falls down into that loop. He spends the year in a mess of anxiety and grief and desperation, spends it battling assassins and family members who should have his back but don’t and his own dark thoughts. 

He plots out Captain Boomerang’s death and feels a sense of satisfaction that if he should kill someone, it should be at seventeen, trapped in the loop of a murder’s cage.

It’s a bad year. One of the worst. But he slowly inches up that line, and the months rotate around him, and eighteen is ahead of him, in his grasp. Eighteen will be better, he knows.

Something changes. Spacetime shifts. Eighteen, brushing at the tips of Tim’s fingers, falls away, and Tim is back down in the bottom of that loop.

Seventeen. On and on and on again.

He keeps climbing. The rollercoaster tracks are slippery with blood and tears, and he keeps falling down, but he picks himself up and keeps climbing on.

Eighteen is coming. Better days are coming. 

He can feel it.)

**Author's Note:**

> i typically dislike when syn is portrayed as something supernatural, but i couldn't help myself with that ending.
> 
> if you wanna read more about sss, this is a really cool academic article that i felt Seen by: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4214186/
> 
> hmu on tumblr @fliipclaw (main) or @bullyingbatman (dc/batfam).


End file.
